Tell My Sorrows to the Stones Page 6

  Behind Weston, the teenaged girl still sobbed over the corpse of her dead aunt. She’d wanted a new beginning, but instead she’d found an ending to so much of her life. All he could think about was that if the girl had been torn open by that thing out in the desert, this son of a bitch would have kept grinning.

  Doing us a favour.

  Weston looked at the grim, cautious expression on Ortiz’s face. The staff sergeant was silently warning him to keep his mouth shut. More than anything, that made him wonder. Was the grinning DEA man just happy the scavenger was out there in the desert, helping him do his job, or had he and his people put the thing there in the first place? And if they had, were there others?

  But he did not ask those questions.

  “A Border Patrol officer—Austin—one of the coyotes shot him. He’s down by the fence, DOA,” he said.

  “A tragedy,” said the grinning man. “Died in the firefight that cost the lives of a number of illegals as they attempted to enter the country carrying cartel cocaine. A hero of the border wars, this Austin. You were lucky to survive yourself.”

  Weston slung his M16 across his back. One last time he glanced at Ortiz. They already had their version of tonight’s op ready to go. If he tried telling it differently, who would listen?

  Slowly, Weston nodded.

  “Sir, yes sir.”

  PUT ON A HAPPY FACE

  The blood seeping out of the midget car was Benny’s first clue that something had gone awry. The audience kept laughing—either they hadn’t seen it yet or they thought it was part of the show—so Benny didn’t slow down. He waddled on his big shoes, storming with exaggerated frustration toward Clancy the Cop, and slapped the other clown in the face with a rubber chicken.

  It looked like it hurt.

  The audience roared.

  Back up.

  The night before—a Friday—the circus had ended at quarter past nine on the dot. Appleby, the manager, was a stickler for punctuality. The last bow took place between ten and fifteen minutes past the hour every performance, and when the thunderous applause—which, honestly, wasn’t always thunderous and was sometimes barely more than a ripple—had died down, the ticket sellers became ushers . . . ushering folks out of the tent as quickly as possible. The ushers didn’t hurry people because anyone was in a rush to get their makeup off, but because once the little kids started moving, all the popcorn and cotton candy and soda and hot dogs started to churn in their bellies. Much better to hose the vomit off the ground outside than in the tent.

  The clowns ran out of the tent the way NFL teams came onto the field, arms above their heads, whooping and hollering, before the last of the crowd had departed. Benny had always thought it looked stupid, but Zerbo—the boss clown and the troupe’s whiteface—wanted to leave the straggling audience members with an image of the clowns as a kind of family.

  Out behind the tent, the family fell apart. The tents and trailers that made up the circus camp were a tense United Nations of performers and labourers without any real unity. Like a high school full of jocks and geeks and emo kids, the clowns and workers and animal trainers and acrobats each formed their own caste, every group thinking themselves above the others. Friendships existed outside the boundaries of those castes, but when it came to conflict, they stuck together like unions. The acrobats were effete, the animal trainers grave and sensitive, and the workers gruff and strong.

  But nobody fucked with the clowns.

  “You mess with the clown, you get the horns,” Zerbo was fond of misquoting, right before blasting you in the face with an air horn. His idea of a joke. Most people laughed, but Benny had never found the boss clown all that funny.

  The Macintosh Traveling Circus Troupe had been playing sold-out audiences in a field in Brimfield, Massachusetts for a week. Normally, the grounds were used for the huge antique flea market the town held a couple of times a year, but the circus had been a welcome novelty, as far as Benny could tell. Not that Appleby talked to him about it. Clowns were beneath the manager’s notice, except when it came time for him to talk to Zerbo about renewing contracts. Even then, nobody bothered to ask Benny what he thought.

  In the hierarchy of clowns in the Macintosh Traveling Circus Troupe, Benny Martini was on the bottom rung. The runt of the litter. The red-headed stepchild. Shit, that last one was probably offensive in these sensitive modern times. No matter. The point was that Benny was an afterthought to everyone, even the audience.

  He’d often thought about how much happier he would have been if, like Tiny and Oscar—two of the other character clowns in the troupe—he’d been too stupid to know it. But even Tiny and Oscar were above him. If the troupe had been a wolf pack, Benny would have been on his back, baring his throat for everyone who came along. And why?

  It was all about the laughs.

  Laughter and his status in the circus, nearly always the only two things he thought about, were foremost on his mind as he followed Zerbo, Oscar, Tiny, Clancy the Cop, and the rest of them into clown alley. Tiny bumped Oscar, then clapped him on the back—they’d successfully completed the Hotshots gag after having totally bungled it the night before. On a façade so rickety even old-time Hollywood stuntmen would’ve shied away from it, three-hundred-pound Tiny dressed in drag and pretended to be a mother trapped with her infant on the third story of a burning building. The fire effects were minimal—gas jets, a low flame, a lot of orange lighting, the whole thing designed by a guy who’d helped put together the Indiana Jones Stunt Spectacular at Disney World, before he’d been fired for drinking on the job—but it looked great, as long as Tiny didn’t set his wig on fire.

  Oscar, in character as a clown firefighter, pushed a barrel of water back and forth across the ring, exhorting Tiny to throw him the infant and then jump into the water. The culmination of the whole thing was that Tiny’s aim would be off, forcing Oscar to step into the water barrel in order to catch the baby—only a doll, of course. At the moment he caught it, the trap door would give way beneath the ring, dropping Oscar and the baby and the water through and giving the audience the impression that the baby had been heavy enough to drive him into the ground. It was a pain in the ass to set up the gag, but when it went off, the surprise always led to real laughs, especially when Tiny theatrically threw up his hands, mopped his sweating face with his wig, took a deep breath, and blew out the fire around the windows like candles on a birthday cake. The lights would go dark. Cue the applause.

  Thursday night, Tiny had stumbled, throwing off his timing. The doll—to the eyes of the crowd, an infant—had tumbled down to splat in the middle of the ring while Oscar stood watching like a fool, until the trapdoor gave way and shot him down into the space beneath. The audience had to know the baby wasn’t real, but they’d screamed all the same.

  Timing was everything, Benny always said.

  How Tiny and Oscar could screw up the gag so badly and still be above him in the pecking order, he would never understand.

  In clown alley that Friday night, he washed off his makeup without a word to any of the others. Most of the time he shot the breeze with them and tried to ignore the fact that, four years since he’d joined up, they still treated him like a mascot, but not tonight. The cold cream took off most of the makeup and then he splashed a little water on his face and dragged on a pair of stained blue jeans and a Red Sox sweatshirt—it had been strangely cool the past few nights, uncommon for July in western Massachusetts.

  As he left the others behind and went out to wander the grounds and clear his head, he ran into the lovely blonde contortionist, Lorna Seger. There were tears in her eyes and she gave him a helpless, hopeless glance that made him think maybe she wanted to talk about her breakup with the stunt rider, Domingo.

  “Hey,” he said, shaken from the reverie of his self-pity by her sadness. “You okay?”

  Lorna smiled and wiped at her eyes. “Could be worse, I guess,” she said. “I could
be a clown.”

  Benny flinched. Lorna chuckled softly to let him know it had been a joke. He hoped Domingo ran her down on his motorcycle.

  “You’re such a bitch,” he said.

  Lorna rolled her eyes. “Why is it clowns never have a sense of humour?”

  He walked on, fuming, wanting to scream, wanting to get the hell away from the circus but crippled by the knowledge that—like everyone else who performed under the tent—he had nowhere else to go.

  Put on a happy face, his mother would have said. Remembering did make him smile, but it faded quickly.

  The wind picked up as he walked the grounds, which were rutted and pitted with tire tracks from decades of vehicles moving through the fields in all weather, turning up muddy ridges, which had then dried and hardened. Loud voices came from the trailers where the workers had made their own small camp, and he could smell sausages cooking on a grill. When he passed a tent, he saw them, standing in a semi-circle, drinking beer, a small radio picking up a static-laced broadcast of tonight’s Red Sox-Yankees game. Summer in New England. These guys looked like their entire life was a tailgate party. They worked hard and were content with the cycle of labour and paycheque, beer and cookouts and Red Sox games. In a way, Benny envied them.

  The stencil on the side of the converted school bus read ROSE’S MOBILE BOOK FAIR. In a side window there hung a cardboard sign, “New, Used, and Antiquarian—Something For Everyone,” written in thick black magic marker. Benny had seen the bus several times this season, in Vermont and New Hampshire and upstate New York. It might’ve been there when they’d played Bangor back in May, but he couldn’t be sure. He’d never been inside—he’d never been much for books, unless they were about clowns or vaudeville or something useful.

  Tonight, he just wanted a distraction.

  The accordion bus door was open and a sign indicated that the mobile book fair was as well, so he went up the couple of steps, ducking his head though he’d never be tall enough to bang it. Oddly enough, he didn’t notice the woman right away. At first, all he could see were the books, and he wondered how she managed to keep them all from falling off the shelves while she drove the old beast of a school bus around the northeastern United States. The metal shelving units had been secured to the walls and lined both sides of the bus. Each shelf had an ingenious device, a bar that went across the spines of the books to hold them in place and could be locked into different notches to accommodate racks of books of different sizes.

  “Looking for something to read?” the woman asked, and he blinked and stared at her.

  She’d been there all along, of course, but it felt almost as if he’d dreamed her into being. Slender and fit, perhaps forty, she wore black pants and shoes and a tight pink tank with a bright red rose silhouette stretched across her breasts. Rose—for how could she have been anyone else?—had an olive complexion and a proud Roman nose, and she wore a kindly expression, her gaze alert and attentive. Though the interior of the mobile book fair was lit mainly with strings of old white Christmas lights, he could see that her eyes were icy blue. It both pleased and unnerved him to have someone study him with such intensity—such intimacy. People looked at him all the time when he had his clown makeup on, but he couldn’t remember how long it had been since anyone had really seen him when he didn’t have it on.

  “I doubt you’d have anything for me,” he said. “I’m not a big reader.”

  “Didn’t you see the sign,” she said, amused. “Something for everyone. What do you do here?”

  He almost lied, but she would’ve taken one look at his little pot belly and stiff shoulders and known he wasn’t an acrobat.

  “I’m a clown.”

  Her eyes lit up. “I’ve got a small section back here. Not a whole shelf, but a handful of interesting antiquarian books I picked up from an old guy in Cheektowaga, when his carnival went belly up.”

  Most of the books were things he’d seen before. Way back in high school, he’d researched Grimaldi and Tovolo and Ricketts, studied the Fratellinis, and watched the films of the great movie directors who had started their careers as circus clowns, like Fellini and Jodorowsky. Charlie Chaplin had become his god, and he mastered the rolling walk of the Little Tramp. There were many schools of comedy, but Benny had never been much interested in telling jokes or doing stand-up. In his heart, he had always been a clown. Though some of them were probably quite valuable, none of the books Rose’s Mobile Book Fair had on her shelves were unfamiliar to him.

  He’d just begun to turn away when he noticed the frayed spine of a book lying on its side atop the dozen or so she had shelved at the end of her boys’ adventure section. The worn, faded lettering was almost unreadable in the shadows, but when he slipped his slender fingers in and slid the volume out, the cloth cover made him stiffen in surprise. The comedy and tragedy masks were there, along with the initials G.T.

  Quickly he leafed to the title page and a warm feeling spread through him. Charade: The Secret to Being a Clown, by Giovanni Tovolo. He had never even heard of the book, had not run across it in any of his reading and research, even in the biography of Tovolo he’d read. The famous Italian character clown had retired after a horrifying accident had taken sixteen lives in a big top fire outside Chicago in 1917. All but forgotten, Tovolo had been a particular fascination of Benny’s because the man had earned his reputation doing characters. Most of the famous clowns were whitefaces or augustes. Tovolo could do anything, at least according to what Benny had read . . . but now, to read it in Tovolo’s own words.

  Maybe Tovolo could help him figure out how he ended up spending four years at the wrong end of clown alley. He glanced up at Rose, unable to stifle his excitement and hoping she didn’t take advantage of him.

  “How much do you want for this one?” he asked.

  She took it from his hand, opened it to see the price she’d penciled on the first page. “Twenty-two dollars.”

  Benny swallowed hard, knowing his smile was too thin. Did she not realize that, to certain collectors, this book would be worth a hundred times that? Or did she simply not care, having paid next to nothing for it herself.

  He smiled. “I’ll take it.”

  Benny’s mother always thought he was funny. All through his childhood he had been encouraged by her laughter, egged on by the way her face would redden and she would wipe at her eyes when he made silly faces or did the big, galumphing walk that would one day become his trademark. At the age of nine he had begun rearranging living room furniture so that he could stumble over it, practicing pratfalls and somersaults and rubber-leg gags—anything that might elicit laughter from his mother. Once she had laughed so hard that she had to wave at him to stop so she could catch her breath. Her chest ached for days afterward, and she had joked often that if he wasn’t careful he would give her a heart attack.

  That’s how funny Benny Martini was as a kid.

  He loved to make her laugh. He watched the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers and forced his friends into helping him reenact their gags. Mrs. Martini took young Benny to the circus every year, and when the clowns made the audience roar with their hilarious antics, he watched with fascination and a dawning envy. For weeks after a circus trip, he would mimic the clowns, practising the faces they pulled, their walks, their timing.

  In school, he put whoopee cushions on the seats of teachers and thumb tacks on the chairs of the girls he liked. In the eighth grade, he had taped a sign to Tim Rivard’s back that read HONK IF YOU THINK I’M A MORON. Only other jocks had been brave enough to make honking noises when Rivard walked down the hall, but it took the football player until fourth period to really start to wonder what all the honking was about. He’d slammed Benny’s head into a locker, but the sign alone hadn’t been enough to prompt the violence. That had come when Benny had pointed out that Rivard going most of the day without noticing the sign pretty much proved his point.

  When Benny told h
is mother what he’d done, she’d put a hand over her mouth to hide her laughter. And when he confessed that he’d been suspended for three days—even though he was the one with the black eye—she’d laughed so hard she had cried, tears streaming down her pretty face, ruining her makeup.

  Benny had become the class clown by design. He knew every class had to have one, and he’d be damned if he let some other guy take on that role. His classmates—hell, the whole school—would remember him forever as that guy, the one with the jokes, the one with the faces, the one who couldn’t be serious for two seconds.

  There were dark moods, of course. Who didn’t have them? Who hadn’t spent a little time studying his own face in the mirror, trying to recognize something . . . anything of value? Who hadn’t tested the edges of the sharpest knives on the hidden parts of their skin just to see how sharp they really were, or sat in the dark for a while and wondered if people were laughing with him or at him?

  By the time senior year of high school rolled around, Benny didn’t know how to be anything but funny, and he didn’t want to learn. His mother had told him he ought to try to do birthday parties, paint himself up as a clown and make children laugh. Benny would rather have cut his own throat. He didn’t want to do gags at birthday parties for a bunch of nose-picking brats; he wanted to perform in a circus.

  The Macintosh Traveling Circus Troupe came to town in the spring of his senior year. The Macintosh was small enough that it still relied on posters hung at ice cream stands and grocery stores and barber shops to pull in an audience. In a little town like Corriveau, Vermont, that sort of thing still worked.

  He’d gone to the circus every day, hung around before and after shows, talked to the workers, the animal trainers, the ticket takers, and eventually worked up the courage to talk to the clowns. By the third day, after hours, they invited him into clown alley to talk with them while they removed their makeup and hung up costumes and props. Benny could barely breathe. It had felt to him as though he had stepped into a film, or into history. He could smell the greasepaint, could practically feel the texture of the costumes, could hear the roar of the crowd, even though the tent had stood empty by then.